Steps towards Green IT

1) What are the Green initiatives that have been taken within your company?

- We shut down the desktop after office hours and during weekends, direct result is 60% reduction in electricity bill.

- Optimizing windows start up time

- We are using thin client technology for desktops machine which are critical, they are more energy efficient and also easy to mange.

- AC shut down after 8 PM and during weekends.

- Use of Virtualization technology, we consolidated the servers, any new application/machine deployment is a contender of virtualization, all the legacy machines/application also replaced with virtualization technology, It direct results in lower power consumption.

- We are using SaaS (Software as a Service) model for payroll and HR dept.

- We have migrated our solution to SaaS (Kind of hosting model).

- Migrated the application from SUN servers to Intel based architecture.

- Energy efficient CFL lighting in the office

- Use of TFT/LCD screen instead of old CRT monitors, TFT/LCD are more energy efficient

2) What are the benefits that have resulted from such green initiatives?

- Cost Saving , better ROI , it is major motivating factor

- Reduced carbon foot print , Greener Planet

- Less Hardware (using virtualization and consolidation of servers )

3) What is the road-map for furthering the green agenda, i.e., what other green initiatives is your company intending to take?

- For new IT equipment we are in process for contract with the Hardware vendor for hardware replacement and refresh after its life cycle(in our case it is Dell)

- Every new application should be deployed using Virtualization technology.

- Relocating our office servers to data center colo. It will save cost for us and bigger data centers can afford Green IT Data center. Many times is not feasible for a smaller company to afford green data center (design, build and its operation) in house.

- Dell servers with Intel high-efficiency power supplies, fans and processors to reduce our total watts per server.

- We partner with a company that refurbishes and resells our old server hardware that we can't reuse internally.

How to extend the virtual disk size in ESX/VM

1. Power off the VM-1
2. Make clone of this VM -1 , call it VM-2 (for backup , in case you mess with VM-1)
3. From Vsphere client , increase the size of the VM-1 , you can also increase with a command line tool. #vmkfstools -X 40G VM-1.vmdk (-X is the switch for the size that you want the disk file to be , not the size you want to extend).
4. Power down VM-2
5. On Hardware tab add a new existing HDD and point it to the original VM-1.vmdk (the disk we resized few minutes back), mount it as second HDD.
6. Boot VM-2
7. From run menu type “diskpart”, this utility resize disk partition in windows 2k3
8. DISKPART> list volume , will show you the list volume , select your volume that you want to extend.
9. DISKPAER> extend , run this command to finally to extend the HDD size.
10. You can cross check the HDD size in HDD management snapin (mycomputer->manage->Disk Management)
11. Shut down VM-2 and remove the disk we added
12. Power on the VM-1
13. Voila you are back to business

another way of doing this

1. Power off VM
2. Add a blank larger target disk
3. Add a temp disk (formatted NTFS) to hold a ghost or acronis image
4. Boot to Ghost or Acronis CD
5. Image source disk to image on your temp disk
6. Restore temp image to your larger disk
7. dismount your source and temp disks and test a boot
8. If everything goes well then you are done, you can delete your temp and source disks.
9. if something bad happen then you can revert back to your original disk.